As a senior developer of 10 years I find myself in the unfortunate situation of facing redundancy. My skillset seems to be somewhat outdated now (my main skill being Foxpro, an Xbase like tool) and there are no jobs in the UK marketplace for this.

I have spent 6 months or so studying Java from the tutorials site, and I really like the technology. However, when it comes to finding another job my experience as a developer seems to count for nothing if I haven't used Java commercially.

I started to look at getting certified, but it is very expensive. If I go to the expense to become an Oracle Certified Programmer, will employers take me seriously? or will it be a waste of time and money as I still don't have commercial experience?

First of all This is completely my opinion and experience. Any one is welcome to override my comments and provide more insight as per experience -

I have found that Java certifications don't help a lot and they are certainly not a replacement for "a real application dev experience". They just reflect taht this person has studied to some more extent and have deep theoratial knowledge of the topic. I think they only help if you already have some experience. OR if there are 5 people with same level of experience and one of them has certification in java, then he will get obvious benefit amoung others. More over there are various certification paths - for basic/core java, than advance java (web, web services, ejb etc). Not sure what part of java you have studied, but these are the major technologies you have to have for becoming a java web programmer - core parts, jsp, servlets, jdbc, knowldge of tomcat, etc etc